Seth389, HELLO! making a short animation instead of a demoreel

[Seth389]

Hi everyone, I’m trying to make something that can hopefully get me hired. Last time I made a demoreel I visited 50 local studios in my town personally to hand them my resume and demoreel. Most of the time you wouldn’t even be let inside the offices. By some unfortunate stroke of luck, I received absolutely zero calls or feedback from this venture.
I gave up.

Fast forward a few years, I got fired from my job wrongly and am currently on arbitration.
So now I have a lot of time to work on my personal stuff. This time I wasn’t just going to make a demoreel.
It’s going to be a short animation, no way I can go unnoticed after that. (also I’d probably be proud of finishing something)

WHICH BRINGS ME HERE!!!
I do not surround myself with artists or particularly bright people, actually my surroundings is filled with people who know nothing on media. The professionals on this site are a bit intimidating D:
BUT I really do need help, teaching yourself 3D isn’t really obvious >_>, also believe me I wouldn’t be asking if it was easy to find.

Now I have this visual issue regarding hair on my character model.

weirdlighting

I am using default lighting and the hair is basically planes with a diffuse maps and opacity maps.
The issue is the weird contour lighting that shows up mostly when viewing the hair from far.
When zooming in , it seems to disappear?

So that has me a bit stumped, I made pretty sure the UV maps were filled in correctly to not have weird lines on the outside.

Anyone know what causes this or experience something similar?
You can reach me at pete.lazarov@gmail.com
Much thanks.

[LucentDreams]

Im pretty sure this is a matter of premultiplied texture alpha with a white colour as the background of your diffuse map.

Basically you have painted sections of hair on a white background as your rgb. And then you have an alpha. The filtering makes the alpha partially transparent where the color meets the white in you color image so white sneaks into your render. In your texture make the color of all the non texture areas as similar to your average hair color as possible, or better yet stretch extend/smudge the edges out further in the rgb but don’t touch your alpha.

Now that said, lets tall about the more serious issue. Are you seriously looking for work in the cg industry. If yes, then making a short is absolutely the wrong way to go. Students in schools often make shorts particularly as they appeal as better sales tools to recruit new students. Any real industry person that will give advice on a real for getting work will same the same things.

Keep it short. Under a minute.
Show your best work first.
If it isn’t good don’t show it. We judge your judgement as much as your best work. A single awesome model or 10 second animation goes a lot further on its own than showing 4 more that aren’t so good and one that’s terrible.

No recruiter or lead/supe has time to watch full short films for every applicant and we aren’t clear on what you want to do if you did everything in a film yourself. You want to model. Show 3 good models. You want to animate show a few animation tests. You want to light. Show me 2 or three lighting treatments of the exact same scene. Dont make a short to land work. Shorts are passion projects for personal gratification.

[Seth389]

eghh sorry , polycount beat you to the correct answer so I continued there (yes it was mipmaps, something I had completely forgotten about).
Thanks for the input though, here’s the result so far, I’m actually juggling multiple models so this one barely progressed :

(white noise is caused by my renderer , didn’t bother letting it render all the way)

And voila, Final fokin fantasy hair.

I agree on your points for not doing a short, but this stems from a frustration on my part of receiving zero feedback. I don’t care if they don’t understand what I want, as long as I get a “wtf?” in my direction that’s good enough for me. I don’t consider myself picky and I want to be able to fit any glove.
Also by short animation I meant like 1min >_>, shouldn’t be too outlandish of an idea. hell I can make a 10 second story if I want, I’m a pretty darn fast and efficient storyboarder.